Court upholds right to own guns

Historic ruling strikes down D.C. ban

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court resolved one of the Constitution's oldest disputes Thursday when it declared that the Second Amendment protects the rights of Americans to keep guns for self-defense.

For the first time in its long history, the court struck down a gun-control law as violating the Second Amendment. The court said "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" is not limited to state militias, as some historians have argued.

The 5-4 decision voided part of the nation's strictest gun-control law, an ordinance in the District of Columbia that forbids homeowners from having handguns.

But it was unclear whether the decision stood for a narrow rejection of an unusually strict gun law, or signaled the opening salvo in a legal war between advocates of gun rights and gun control.

Justice Antonin Scalia spent most of his 64-page opinion explaining why history was on his side. He cited the Stuart Kings of England and how they had used their militias to disarm their opponents.

"By the time of the founding [of this country], the right to have arms had become fundamental for English subjects," he said. "There seems to us no doubt, on the basis of both text and history, that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms." But having announced a historic ruling, Scalia stressed that the decision was narrow and its practical effects limited.

"Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places, such as schools and government buildings, laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of firearms," he said.

Moreover, "prohibitions on carrying concealed weapons" and the "carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons," such as machine guns, are not in doubt either, he said.

Still, constitutional rights can be invoked widely.

If the Second Amendment right to have a firearm is akin, for example, to the First Amendment right to freedom of speech, it could be used to challenge a wide range of gun laws.

Scalia did not say how Second Amendment rights were to be evaluated.

"Since this case represents this court's first in-depth examination of the Second Amendment, one should not expect it to clarify the entire field," he wrote.

That means more lawsuits and future cases.

Gun-rights advocates have long objected to city, state and federal regulations on owning and carrying firearms.

Shortly after the decision, lawyers for the National Rifle Association said they would sue to challenge handgun restrictions in San Francisco, Chicago and elsewhere.

The four dissenters on the court said the majority had unwisely opened the door to legal attacks on popular and effective gun-control measures.

"I fear that the District's policy choice may be just the first of an unknown number of dominoes to be knocked off the table," Justice John Paul Stevens said in a 46-page dissent.